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Trojan Horse (1700) by Arcimboldo, in the collection of National Portrait Gallery (Sweden)
In 2005 Il Giornale Nuovo[1] reported that the above painting was lost, someone even offered 500 USD for information on its whereabouts.
Last week, I bought the book Les Tentations de Bosch ou L’éternel retour. On page 111 it states that the painting is located in Sweden’s National Portrait Gallery.
Is the painting on display there?
Anyone?
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Howard Phillips Lovecraft in 1915 [image source]
In 2011, blogger Cthulhu Chick [1] counted American author H. P. Lovecraft‘s favorite words:
One of the things any fan of Lovecraft discovers early on is that Lovecraft was very attached to certain words. We either laugh or groan every time we hear something described as “indescribable” or called “unnamable” or “antiquarian” or “cyclopean.” And sometimes we wonder how many times he actually used the words.
This is the list:
Abnormal – 94, Accursed – 76, Amorphous – 19, Antediluvian – 10, Antiqu (e/arian) – 128, Blasphem (y/ous) – 92, Cat – 46, Charnel – 20,Comprehension – 9, Cyclopean – 47, Dank – 19, Decadent – 32, Daemoniac – 55, Effulgence – 4, Eldritch – 23, Faint (ed/ing) – 189, Foetid – 22,Fungus/Fungoid/Fungous – 54, Furtive – 60, Gambrel – 21, Gibbous – 9, Gibber (ed/ing) – 10, Hideous – 260, Immemorial – 25, Indescribable – 25, Iridescence – 2,Loath (ing/some) – 71, Lurk – 15, Madness – 115, Manuscript – 35, Mortal – 27, Nameless – 157, Noisome – 33, Non-Euclidean – 2, Proportion/Disproportionate – 53,Shunned – 54, Singular (ly) – 115, Spectral – 60, Squamous – 1, Stench – 59, Stygian – 6, Swarthy – 14, Tenebrous – 9, Tentacle(s) – 28, Ululat (e/ing) – 4,Unmentionable – 16, Unnamable – 22, Unutterable – 13
See also: frequency list
It’s funny how Venus Rising from the Sea — A Deception (c. 1822, above) by American painter Raphaelle Peale relates to the Veil of Veronica by Francisco de Zurbarán of the previous post.[1]
The Veil of Veronica is about appearing (the face of Jesus in a handkerchief), the Venus deception about hiding and disappearing (Venus hiding from sight).
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Veil of Veronica by Francisco de Zurbarán (1598 – 1664), Bilbao Fine Arts Museum version
I love the bodiness and sheer ‘physicality’ of relics (lit. remains, often of body parts).
The French protestant satire Apologie pour Herodote (1566) was one of the first texts to poke fun at the Christian obsession with relics:
“A monk of St. Anthony having been at Jerusalem, saw there several relics, among which were a bit of the finger of the Holy Ghost, as sound and entire as it had ever been; the snout of the seraphim that appeared to St. Francis; one of the nails of a cherubim; one of the ribs of the verbum caro factum (the word made flesh); some rays of the star which appeared to the three kings in the east; a phial of St. Michael’s sweat when he was fighting against the devil; a hem of Joseph’s garment, which he wore when he cleaved wood.”–(tr. via Curiosities of Literature).
Apologie pour Herodote (1566, English: The Apology of Herodotus) is a protestant satire of catholicism by French printer and classical scholar Henri Estienne.
Brutalism at the Schoonselhof. Jack Godderis grave seen from the back (rear).
Photo Jan Willem Geerinck.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pvmfbOEjKY
“Milestones” by Miles Davis is the 829th entry in my top 1000 songs. There is no hierarchy in this top 1000 list. It’s like a giant mixtape you can put on shuffle.
829 songs (six years in the making; i.e. compiling) account for about fifty hours of music. When finished, the list will feature more than 58 hours of music. The average song length in my calculations is three minutes and a half.
I can’t remember exactly how but I managed to stumble on a complete version of the German short film Besonders wertvoll.
On Youtube, of all places:
Besonders wertvoll (1968, English: Of Special Merit) is a short subject directed by Hellmuth Costard and produced by Petra Nettelbeck.
The film, now almost fifty years old, criticized the new German Film Funding Act of 1967 by way of a talking phallus representing German politician Hans Toussaint, co-sponsor of the new film funding law. The title Besonders wertvoll translates as ‘of particular merit’ (as in cultural significance vs. ‘utterly without redeeming social importance‘) and is an allusion to the highest film rating given by Deutsche Film- und Medienbewertung.
Love misquotations? Here’s a good one. This film is famous for originating “Only the perverse fantasy can still save us,” (misattributed to Goethe), which is shown at the end of the film credits.
For those of you interested in weird films, here[2] is a Youtube playlist of films featured in Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art (1974)
The film is a milestone in the history of the sexual revolution in Germany.
Caricature of Innocent XI (1676) by Bernini
I’ve been furthering my research on the history of caricature, aided by two books: History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art (1864) by Thomas Wright and Caricature and Other Comic Art (1877) by James Parton, the two earliest Anglophone studies on the subject.
Both mention amusing examples of Roman caricature: the Pygmy caricatures in Pompeii.
Neither mentions the Caricature of Innocent XI (1676) by Bernini (above).
Already in 1916 the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi in Sex in Psychoanalysis wrote:
“The derisive remark was once made against psychoanalysis that the unconscious sees a penis in every convex object and a vagina or anus in every concave one. I find that this sentence well characterizes the facts.” (tr. Ernest Jones)
I found the above dictum while researching sexual symbolism. Ferenczi’s dictum was most famously referenced in Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History by Norman O. Brown.
Update 2025: I illustrated this post with The Shell by Odilon Redon.
